// Changing the Physical Environment \\

I have always believed that some sort of change in the classroom can reactivate the mind to refocus. Without some sort of change students become accustomed their surrounding and they might become oblivious to aspects of schooling. Changing the seating or the physical environment are two ways to keep students focused.

When I first came into my internship class, there were 23 students. After the school got a new kindergarten unit, we decreased our class size to 18. My CT decided to adjust the seating arrangement so that the table groups will be heterogeneous groups. Additionally, when teaching throughout the day, she varies between sitting on the carpet and sitting in their seats. Although the students are still in the same physical environment-the classroom-my CT still u see changes in the students visual stimuli and body arrangement. Moving from the carpet in between each lesson is one aspect that interests me in her classroom transitions.

In one of my lessons, I changed the physical environment in which the students were in. As an individual that values nature, I decided to change the environment to outside. One of Howard Gardener’s multiple intelligences is naturalistic. In this intelligence type, an individual learns best when surrounded by natural elements in some way, whether that’s by being in nature or incorporating natural elements within a lesson. This lesson involved physically being in nature. The students were to do a shape hunt in which they find objects in nature that are shaped like a rentable, square, triangle, and circle. This not only is beneficial for students that are naturalistic intelligence, but also it applies to real world applications. While being outside the students were extremely well behaved, they were focused and had very good discussions within their groups. In some regard, I do believe that this positive experience was to due to the change in physical environment. at this age, students are naturally curious about the world, so allowing them to explore in the world captures this curiosity and harnesses it.

Since I am a strong advocate for Howard Gardener’s Theory of Multiple Intelligent and nature in learning, I will be incorporating that into my own classroom as much as possible. The lesson that I did, reinforces my advocacy. Having students learn outside satisfies that necessity to change environments. Additionally, I think that changing the seating arrangement can positively affect learning as well. Modifying the layout to match the learning style of the lesson can increase the type of learning desired. For example, if you are having a discussion in class, arranging the desks in a circle can increase collaboration and discussion. Understating how changing the seating arrangement/physical environment can benefit learning is the first step in increasing achievement in your class.

// Forming Classroom Management out of Play Doh \\

1. What did you learn about your philosophy from making a model?

I learned that it is actually really hard to try and make a tangible thing that represents my belief for classroom management. My philosophy for management is looking at the reasons why students behave in certain ways, and trying to represent “rationale” is a hard thing to do. Additionally, as I was making the model I my ideas for management seemed to expand. As I made each piece I thought about how something else I needed to add to try and explain my reasoning.

2. What did you learn about your philosophy from your classmates observations/comments?

I learned from my classmate’s comments that I would like to add certain aspects into my philosophy statement. I hadn’t really said anything about having a positive environment and somehow through my representation, my classmates said “positivity”. I am glad that my model did represent “positivity” because I think I took advantage of thought that was more of an unspoken characteristic of my belief. I also saw “tools for success”, which I thought was a very great way to think of management in a positive manner. In my classroom management belief, giving students the tools to be successful and overcome their needs gives them a sense of belonging and initiative.

3. How did you expand your philosophy? Explain?

My philosophy expanded by giving me a new perspective on how to construct meaning through tangible items. My philosophy expanded through showing me that there are more to my philosophy then meets the eye, a philosophy is made up many branches and can be grown as time goes on. My philosophy expanded in the way of giving me more to think about with classroom management such as positivity and being understanding. Both of which I hadn’t thought about when developing my classroom management philosophy but they are things that are key for students to feel safe and comfortable.

4. How will you implement this philosophy in the classroom during internship (provide examples)?

Although my CT has a differing philosophy as my own, I can still bring in the positive and caring portion of my philosophy into the classroom. I can look into the aspects of why students are acting the way they are so that I can find out the root of the matter to solve this. This can assist my CT because it may support my students and mitigate the “inappropriate” behavior.

// Sneaking Naturalism into Learning \\

When I was told by my CT that I was teaching the students shapes as my connected lesson, I knew I wanted to bring nature into the classroom (as being a naturalist). I thought, what better way than taking the students outside to explore the shapes that naturally occurring in the outside environment. This gave them not only a stronger understanding that shapes exist everywhere and not just though manipulatives, but also they were able to really explore and use creative thinking to learn.

As a teacher, you are constantly connecting lessons back to another lesson throughout the school day; however, as an intern you don’t have the opportunity to do that as often as a normal working teacher does. For this lesson, I was able to collect data from the day before in order to adjust my lesson according to the needs that I saw from my students. The lesson topic was on two dimensional shapes such as circle, triangle, square, and rectangle. For this lesson I used a formative assessment that involved the students completing a shape hunt exit ticket worksheet. From that, I was able to see what students needed to be challenged and what students needed extra support for this lesson. In this lesson, the students were going to go outside and find shapes in the natural environment and label their drawings with words. The students were going to work collaboratively with their peers (groups made from their formative assessment) and learn through doing rather than being a passive warm body in the room. I think that because this was a connected lesson, I had more confidence teaching this lesson than the ones from the past. This might be because I knew what the students had learned yesterday, and I had full confidence in what information they knew and what information they still needed a strong foundation in. The thing I really liked that I did for this lesson was my explicit directions. That has been something that I have struggled with the past couple of lessons, however, this time I made sure to explain everything and not to leave anything out. These students need every detail when it comes to directions, and especially since the students were going to be doing something that was out of their normal routine, explicit instruction was necessary. I felt as though because I did give such clear directions, the students didn’t stray from the activity, they stayed on topic the entire time, no behavior problems, no complaining, no questions. Additionally, another thing that I liked that I did was the discussion after the lesson. I think that discussion is something that is sparsely used in kindergarten because we think they are not structured enough for it. However, these students were perfectly capable of staying focused, attentive, and respectful for this discussion. During the discussion, I asked the students what they liked about the activity and they input their opinions in a very informative way.

Even though there were good things, there are always things that I could improve on. Some of these things were my differentiation skills. Although I had differentiated the lesson activity, I felt that I should have given more of an enriching opportunity such as letting students find different types of shapes other than circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. Something that went differently than what I had planned was the speed of the entire lesson. My lesson from the day before took a good 40/45 minutes, so I was expecting the students to take around 40 minutes for this one too. However, the students stayed on task so much that they didn’t need as much time as what I thought. This isn’t something necessarily bad, however, the speed could have been influenced by my lack of challenge for some of the students.

The aspect of the lesson that I was surprised about was the conversations that I was hearing from the students. The collaboration groups were collaborating in a very mature way, in that they were feeding off of each other’s knowledge and building upon each other’s strengths. The groups were heterogenous so that the students would benefit from each other in multiple ways. These groups allowed my ELL student to be able to thrive in the activity because she had visual cues and was able to watch her fellow peers in what they were doing. The differentiation of adding in the sentence starter “I see…” gave her the ability to see how that sentence would look. 

// Adapting and Perspectives \\

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen my English Language Learner struggle with classwork and commands given throughout the day. Normally, in class she ends up just watching the ones around her and copying their work. Although one could argue that at least she is cognizant of what’s happening around her, if she is unable to understand what context she is copying it might not do any good. During writing time, she normally just draws pictures unrelated to what their focus is on that my CT models with them. My English Language Learner pays attention during the modeling, but it doesn’t seem to help. This struggle occurs during the other subjects as well.

I decided since I knew some simple Spanish words, I would try to support her learning by giving her more individualized help by pairing Spanish terms with English words. During writing one time, the students were to write about location words. I know some location words enough to tell her what to do . After telling her in Spanish what to do, I followed it by saying it in English. She then started drawing a picture that would show location. After seeing what she was drawing, I wrote the sentence for her about the drawing in Spanish first, then underneath it I wrote it in English, making sure to repeat the English sentence. When she saw the English sentence, she was sure to copy it underneath my writing. The last couple of times of being at internship I have been making sure to provide her with necessary support either by pairing English with Spanish or by giving her visuals through images or motions. I’ve actually noticed a noticeable difference in her demeanor while at school. She is much more talkative to me, she laughs all the time, and honestly she brings so much happy energy to the class. She also lights up when I come to help her, and I think my CT and I get at least ten hugs a day from her. Her change in character makes me believe how appreciative she is for me giving her help. Being an English Language Learner in school can be a frustrating and scary thing, but when given appropriate support they feel much more safe and cared for.

These past two semesters, I’ve had English Language Learners in both of my CT’s classes. I have really gotten a whole new perspective from working with these students throughout internship. This new perspective has broadened my passion for helping and teaching children, by igniting a flame. I absolutely love working with these students because the light that comes into their eyes when they understand another language is worth every second of my dedicated time. Additionally, throughout my experience of working with English Language Learners, I have decided to further my education by getting certified in TESOL to be an ESOL resource teacher or even to teach English in another country.

// Connecting Shapes in the Classroom \\

On October 18th, I taught a shapes lesson on my kindergarten class. Within this lesson, the students focused on the 2-d shapes: triangle, circle, square, and rectangle. Prior to teaching this lesson, I gave the students a pre-assessment in which the students cut and pasted real world images by the 2-d shape they are most similar too. In this pre-assessment, I was able to see any misconceptions that the students had about rectangles and squares, and circles and ovals. It also showed me what students were able to recognize shapes and be able to match the correlating shapes. From this assessment, I adjusted my lesson to ensure I explicitly teach misconceptions.

There were some things I liked about this lesson, and there were some things I think I could have done better. One of the strategies I liked was the shape hunt chant. The students thoroughly enjoyed this chant because they were able to get up and do movements while chanting and looking for shapes. From watching the video, I saw that the students were all actively engaged during this part. The chant and movement was where I made my connection to another course I’ve taken. In my ESOL course, we learned about the ESOL strategy jazz chants. Within these, you (as the teacher) say each lyric one at a time allowing students to repeat it after. This allows the students (who may not be fluent in English) to be able to actively participate. Additionally, another thing we learned in ESOL was total physical response (TPR). In this strategy, students correlate movement with words (Diaz-Rico & Weed, 2010). In the shape hunt chant I did, the students did movements while chanting. I have an ESOL student in my classroom and I am particularly interested in ESOL so being able to use these strategies advantages my student and my practice. However, even though these are ESOL strategies, they support all of the students thinking and provides good foundations for their learning. Another thing I liked during my lesson was the quick reflection response I had. After doing the chant for the first time, I didn’t have the students sit down in order to fill out the class shape chart. I noticed that the students got a little antsy when we were sharing what things they saw that was a certain shape. I’m glad I was able to recognize this and reflect quickly to make the small adjustment of having the students sit down while doing the chart. Something that I wish I would have done differently was to use a different book. The book that I used was one my CT had. Since I couldn’t find a book at the USF library to use on Monday, I used what as available. The thing I didn’t really like about it was that it didn’t talk about sides and vertices. Another thing I would have done differently was to use a bigger chart. We only wrote three objects in each shape box and we still had to cram the words and pictures in, making it a little disorganized. Another strategy I would have liked to incorporate is manipulatives. The students could have felt them in their hand while we were discovering the number of sides and vertices. This could have supported their visual and kinesthetic understanding of the shapes. In my math class we learn about giving students multiple different opportunities and chances to learn content through various strategies. Not all students learn the same way and because of that, I’ve learned that giving students different opportunities to learn math provides them with equity to learn. These multiple strategies technique is in line with the standards because it is showing students the reasoning behind math with all the different visual ways to represent it (Van De Walle, Karp, & Bay-Williams, 2013).

The aspects of the lesson that was done differently then I had planned was the mentor text used and the clearness of directions. I had planned on finding a book that was more informational then just fun. I think a book that talked about the attributes of the shapes would have been a good addition to the lesson. I have been really trying to make my directions as explicit as possible. Even though my CT said that my directions were alright, I think I could have done a better job because some students were still a little confused as to what they needed to do.

The part that surprised me about the lesson was the pure enjoyment that the students had while doing the shape hunt. During the triangle search, I warned the students that this one was tricky because there weren’t a lot of them in here. One of the students pointed out the triangle made in the capital A. I never even thought of that triangle when I was pre-planning, so I was genuinely surprised from this students keen eye.

In order to see if the students learned from this lesson, I had the students fill out an exit ticket. They were to draw something that we saw was the shapes we worked on in class. I was able to see what students understood the lesson as far as what objects make a particular shape and which don’t. I was also able to see what accommodations I needed to make for my lesson activity tomorrow, in which they were to work collaboratively. I wanted to pair the students in heterogeneous groups in which they were able to be supported from each other in the group. There were students that had a difficult time with the exit ticket because I expected them to write words of what they drew a picture, however, there are some students who are still working on their writing stills. Therefore, those students didn’t write any letters and struggled with articulating their thinking. Seeing this, I was able to adjust my groups for the next days lesson.

References:

Diaz-Rico, L. T., & Weed, K. Z. (2010). The crosscultural, language, and academic development handbook: A complete k-12 reference guide (4th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education.

Van De Walle, V. A., Karp, K. S., & Bay-Williams, J. M. (2013). Elementary and middle school mathematics: Teaching developmentally(4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

// Parents are Partners \\

Communicating with parents or students’ family is key to understanding a student’s funds of knowledge and establishing a healthy relationship between their school and home life. Making your classroom known as a partnership between the teacher and the parent is a comforting idea for a parent of a child. They want to know what their child is doing in class and they want to know that their input about their child is valued. Even though a teacher may be over whelmed with a parents involvement, I think at the end of the day, it will make a big difference in the students learning.

The past couple of days of internship, my CT has me stand with the door open in the morning. This gives the visual that the classroom is open and welcoming students and parents rather than a closed of room that is prison like. I have really actually valued the time of doing this because I am the fist face the students see in the morning, and I always make sure to give them a big smile and tell them good morning. As we learned in class, “you create the weather in your classroom”. When I hear this quote, I think that as a teacher, you are the one who sets the tone, and that tone is established first thing in the morning. Making that effort to greet students increases their enthusiasm and enjoyment that their going to have in school that day. I’m not sure if the principal just recently instructed my CT and other kindergarten teachers (or all the teachers) that they need to keep their door open in the morning, because in the first couple of weeks of internship, my CT never held the door open. It wasn’t until the very first day I saw her holding the door open that she asked me if I could do it. She normally changes the centers that the students have in the morning, or she is doing some sort of assessment organization in the morning , so that’s why she asks me to hold the door open.

On Wednesday, when I was holding the door open, I had a run in with one of the parents. To understand my run in, it’s important to know about a previous occurrence. The school that I intern at decided to do a whole group conference night where all the parents are in one room and there is a data chart shown with numbers shown on certain points. Those points represent the students in the classroom, and the numbers were given anonymously so that parents were able to see their child next to the other students in the class. As you can imagine there was some negativity that derived out of this, because one of the parents thought that this was pointing out how far below her child was. Every morning I see this parent drop off her child. There has never been a negative vibe I’ve gotten during the morning, but these past few times I’ve held the door open, I have been a little worried that something would happen. On this occurrence on Wednesday morning, I saw her walking up with her child. We made small talk and was telling her child to tell me about a new educational show he watches. I decided to take it upon myself to inform the parent about the day that her child had the day before. He was on task the entire day and he gave so much effort. I told her about this and about how proud I was of him. She seemed to really appreciate me telling her about this because even though her child did have a blue smiley face in his agenda (blue is one clip up), she may not have known why he was. I think that telling her about this may have helped in creating a more positive relationship between her and the classroom. I wanted her fell that her child is valued in the room and that she is a partner.

I actually feel as though this has been one of the first times I have genuinely felt like a teacher. Communicating with the parents is such a huge aspect of teaching and I feel like this entire internship experience has focused mostly on only half of the job. I have always enjoyed interacting with people, and having the opportunity to see the kids every morning and have that time to just say good morning to the parents is really encouraging to me. It gives me ideas of when I have my own classroom. I definitely think I want to hold the door open because it creates such a welcoming feeling that I’m sure parents will appreciate. They also have that brief moment to talk to me about their child which creates that partnership feeling, which I believe is essential. Most parents want to be included in their child’s education and feel valued when their input is appreciated. I hope to continue holding the door open in the morning and creating a better relationship with the parents of my students.

// Deciding on Assessment \\

A large portion of teaching is being able to analyze an assessment and make appropriate adjustments to instruction. This is all apart of being a reflective practitioner and an effective educator. The assessment I chose to use during the first lesson of the connected lesson was one that the students would be using the next day in their lesson. I figured it would be most appropriate to do so because then I would truly be able to see where students were at in order to adjust their learning experience the next day. The assessment had four shapes on it: a circle, a square, a rectangle, and I’m still deciding on the last shape. Even though we would be going over the shapes during class the formative exit ticket allows me to see which students recognize and have the ability to pair shapes with objects. This assessment has a line above the shape and says “I found a [shape name]. It was a _______” where the students would write in an object they see that is in that shape. The entire assessment would give me the necessary information in order to pair which students together in the following lesson.

The first pre-assessment I am going to have the students do is a matching worksheet. This will have various real world items pictured and I will have the students sort them in their proper shapes. The images will be things seen throughout the real world. The shapes that I will use on the assessment are triangle, square, rectangle, circle, and possibly other main 2-d shapes that they could see. This assessment will show me what shapes the students are familiar with and what they are not familiar with. Since this is going beyond just being able to recognize a drawn shape, it is allowing me to really see if the students see that there are items in the real world that can be defined as shapes. Additionally, since this is what my lesson will be about, it will give me the necessary information to provide any scaffolding that may be necessary. It will also tell me if students already all know a certain shape then instead of focusing on that shape, I can do another shape instead, thus expanding their knowledge rather than just teaching them what they already know.

The assessment I chose to use after my day one lesson is the exact one that they would be using other shape hunt. I chose this as the formative assessment so that I would be able to see who was competent in the assessment and needed enrichment the next day and who would need extra support with a partner the next day as well. Additionally, I would be able to see if I needed to make changes to the assessment during the shape hunt. The data I am collecting is whether or not students are able to identify and match objects with their shape. I am also able to see which students are competent in their writing skills.

The matching pre-assessment will be administered during the morning when the students arrive to class. Depending on what time the students arrive they will begin working on it and will have until when school starts. Since they arrive at different times each student will just complete the assessment in the amount of time that it takes them, rather than having a set time for all the students to start and end at. Additionally, some students take a longer time to cut and paste than other students so giving them the appropriate time they need is also a variable. If I had to guess the approximate time a student will take on this assessment it would be 10 minutes. These students are still in the developmental stage where cutting does take a good amount of time, therefore it will take them longer to do this assessment because of that. This assessment won’t take long to grade, since it only requires students to match real world objects with their shape, it will only take me about 5 minutes to review. I will be able to create a list of objects that explicitly need to be taught and ones that just need reviewed.

Since the other assessment is an exit ticket, and it is only requiring the students to write one word, the assessment should only take 5-7 minutes. Many of the students are still developing their writing skills, so that’s why it varies in time and will take them longer than 1-2 minutes. The time it takes to grade, is simply going through the pages and making notes about who already met standards and needs enrichment and who will need extra support in the following lesson. Going through the assessment will approximately take me 15-20 minutes. It takes me this long because I am including the time it takes to give students appropriate accommodations in the next lesson such as partners or enrichment opportunities.

The challenge in the pre-assessment that I anticipate is that the students will misinterpret a circle for a oval or vice versa. The same with the rectangle. Even though this is a challenge, it is a misconception that some students may have and that’s all apart of doing pre-assessments: so that you are able to accommodate according to student needs. Another challenge that I anticipate is that some students may cut a little too much and so that will limit the ability for me to really see what the student knows. The whole morning time is another problem that could potentially be an issue. Since some students don’t come in until the last few minutes before school starts, they will have a limited amount of time to complete this. My CT may let my students complete this assessment while she is doing morning meeting so that I am able to have their pre-assessment information for my lesson. If she does not, then I will have to take every issue as a grain of rice, continue to be flexible and work with the data that I am given.

The challenge I anticipate for the first day’s assessment is that even though students may be able to identify objects as shapes, since they can’t write words they won’t be able to show their understanding. Another problem I anticipate is that students will simply take and copy words in the chart and write them into their assessment. However, even though they might copy the word, they are still able to recognize that those objects are under the word circle/square/rectangle/etc. Additionally, my next problem, plays into a misconception. The students may not be able to differentiate between a rectangle and a square. In order to prepare for these challenges, I will be keeping the chart on the board up so students can reference them if necessary. However, I will not point out the fact that its still up because I want to see if the students are able to use the things around them to reason and problem solve. Even though the misconception is a challenge, this isn’t really something I would avoid in the assessment, because this is part of making appropriate adjustments in the following lesson since the first lesson wasn’t suffice in explanation.

This is similar to the assessment I plan to give at the end of day 1.

possible option for pre-assessment

possible option for pre-assessment

// Expos, white boards, and impromptu decisions \\

The day and age of the 21st century has brought us an abundant reliability on technology. Within the classrooms, technology is often a gift no matter how minute or small it may seem. Having an ELMO and a projector might not seem like much to some schools who have iPads, but to a school that doesn’t have such luxuries it can make a big difference. Although technology can be a blessing, it can also be a hindrance when it goes awry. If a teacher is unable to be flexible when cases like this happens it can cause unnecessary anxiety.

Within my classroom, my CT uses the ELMO quite frequently. She uses it for science, math, and social studies every day. Since I have been in her class, I have never observed this technology not working for her. There was one time that the power went, out while it was raining, during a math lesson. She instructed me to write on the white board and she wrote on the board as well. The only other times I have seen her write on the front white board is for doing tally marks for table points. Although I haven’t seen her write on the front white board much, she has a white board on her easel in front  of the carpet that she uses every day. She uses this white board easel to model sentences during ELA time, write words that begin with a certain letter, etc. I believe that she uses this board much more because the majority of her class is centered around being on the carpet. Since the kids are on the carpet for most of the lessons using that board would be more appropriate that using the front white board.

During this past week, my CT has had to take half days both Tuesday and Wednesday due to personal reasons. She instructed in her sub lessons to “let my intern do as much as she can”. Both subs obliged happily to give me the majority of control. During the math lesson on Tuesday, for some reason half way through the projector turns off. I tried pushing the power button a couple of times, but instead of getting stressed out,  I did the first thing that came to my mind: use the white board. I jumped up right away and started using the white board to write numbers and draw images to keep the normal pace of the lesson. I walked around as well so that I could see if the students were able to follow along with me even though they weren’t able to physically see me filling out the page on the ELMO. They did great! After the math lesson came social studies, which again normally requires a projector. Instead of showing the students under the ELMO how to cut and place the pictures of community helpers into their notebooks, I thoroughly explained it to them while holding up the pictures in the front of the class. During this lesson, the students were to tell me what tools the community helpers needed, and I would draw a picture of the tool and write the word (with their help) under the image of the corresponding community helper. While the students were cutting out the pictures, I used that time to write each of the community helper names on the board very large. The lesson went on how it normally would, but instead of drawing and writing on a notebook, I drew and wrote on the board. The students seemed slightly more engaged then they normally are which I thought was interesting. This could be because the deviance form the normal routine, but I’m not sure.

After completing this task–not necessarily planned–I learned a lot about being flexible and resourceful. When I first began teaching, if something didn’t go right I would get stressed out. I would be so concerned with the fact that something isn’t going as planned, that the long term picture of time wasted would be blurry to me. I’ve seen how important it is to be able to take impromptu opportunities to teach students something or to take a deep breath and laugh at yourself. Teaching to me shouldn’t be such a stressful and anxiety filled job. If it is, students can sense that tension and it doesn’t make for a good learning community. That all being said, sometimes technology doesn’t work and that’s okay. Just move on and use your other resources.

// Controlled Chaos? \\

I never would have imagined that I would be teaching in a kindergarten class two years, even one year ago. That being said, my second formal lesson didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked it to have gone. I taught a social studies lesson that was focused on community helpers. My objective was that the students would be able to identify what tools certain community helpers used and what they did for the community. Since I had started my previous lesson with a read aloud and it went well, I thought I would do the same thing for this lesson. I’m not sure why, but this time the students were really rowdy when I was trying to start the lesson. I think that if I would have been more stern it may have helped this case. The chaos that started the lesson made me feel a little anxious and I never really felt relaxed because I didn’t want to loose control of the students. I think that I have a fear of telling one of the students to clip down because I have a vivid negative memory towards this, and I just feel that there has to be a better way then telling a student to clip down in order to behave. Not only did my read aloud not go as expected, my oral explicit directions that I was going to give the students didn’t go as expected either. When I was telling the students what we would be doing, I don’t think I was explicit enough. That was even something that my CT mentioned to me during my post conference. She said that she can tell that I am used to working with older students because for this age of kids its extremely important to remember to be very clear and to repeat yourself. These students don’t process information as quickly as a fifth grader and they need every detail of directions told to them in an explicit and clear way. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would do many things differently. First I would make sure to explain to the students that there will be one book at each table and you will work together at your table to find the tools that are within the book. I would also make sure that they understand they will only be focusing on drawing tools for the one community helper that your book is about because afterwards we will come together and share what each table had. If I had the resources I would have actually liked students to be able to manipulate and see the tools that some of the community helpers use so that they are able to visualize and clearly link a tangible tool with a community helper. At this age I think that having this type of activity would have been appropriate and it would also support English language learners because they are able to have that tangible visual to link to word meaning. Additionally, if I had the resources and if I was the classroom teacher, I would have liked to invite community helpers in the classroom to talk to the students. Having speakers there would allow the students to ask them questions and their excitement and engagement would have been very high because there is a visitor. Direct changes that I would make to this lesson that I would have control over, would be utilizing the classroom helper: teacher assistant. This job is in charge of helping the teacher pass out papers and I think this would have been useful instead of me having to do this and call the students to their tables. It would have decreased my anxiety and stress because I would be able to focus my control on the students rather than multi-tasking. I did like how before the story I connected to their jobs within the classroom, however I think that they got a little distracted from this point I was trying to make because they were mainly concerned with just telling me all of the jobs. Another thing that I liked was when I had the students gives me thumbs up during the read aloud. While I was reading there were a few students who were disengaged, but when I did the thumbs up and involved them their attention was gained. Next time, I would like to do more of this type of involvement during a read-aloud. A particular instance that comes to my mind after watching my lesson was when I asked the students, “How many firetrucks do you see?”. I asked this question before I set the expectation as to how they should answer it. Again, I think I take for granted that they know how to answer a question because they all shouted out 3 before I get out, “raise your hand”. A positive from this is that most of the students did answer and they were enthusiastic to answer. That being said, does it matter if I had students raise their hand or not? Is raising your hand for everything just a social norm? This event makes me reflect and really think about how I want my classroom to work. What should the norms be? Should it be so structured that the fun is taken out of school? All of these questions also are correlated to what I am learning about in Creating and Differentiating Learning. We have been discussing norms, procedures, and rules that are within a classroom, and I think that this topic might be one that I would ask the students about. I’d like to get their opinion about it since they will be the ones required to do it. I’ve learned that student involvement is important in making norms and rules because then the students are more likely to follow then and they are also learning morality (DeVries & Zan, 2003).

After reflecting a little bit I just think that if the lesson was a little more interactive the management would have been better and it would have been clear that the students grasped the concept. The few times that I did involve the students, they were fully engaged and they were excited. It was when I put the focus back on a teacher centered classroom that I lost some of the students. Another claim that I can make is that these students need explicit instruction followed by repetition. When they have this type of instruction of directions then they are able to fully function independently. It’s when I don’t set every expectation that I am looking for when they are confused and a little chaotic. Overall, I think that the lesson was a good idea because after the read aloud, it was more based on student discovery learning and that is what I love basing my lessons off of. Having the picture books made it a little bit more friendly to English language learners, however, I should have had some sort of way to tell her what we were to draw. It may have been beneficial to model one of the community helpers first before the students began. My CT even made that suggestion in our post conference. I could have modeled the firefighter because I had just read it to the class. Doing this would have not only cleared up any confusion as to what they were doing, but it would have also given the English language learners a visual as to what we were doing. They would have been able to link the images as what that community helper uses. I am so curious of how kindergarteners would do with a video. I could have shown a video of community helpers because as I was planning the lesson I saw many resourceful videos on the topic. I think that they would be enjoy a video, as long as it was short enough to keep their attention in line with their developmental ability. Overall, I think that the lesson just needed a little bit more explicit expectation and instruction and more student involvement.

Resources:

DeVries, R., & Zan, B. (2003, September). When children make rules. Educational Leadership, 64-67.